Tianjin Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, No. 6 Huayue Road, Hedong District, Tianjin, 300011, China.
BMC Public Health. 2024 Oct 21;24(1):2895. doi: 10.1186/s12889-024-20399-8.
Air quality health index (AQHI), as a developed air quality risk communication tool, has been proved to be more accurate in predicting air quality related health risks than air quality index (AQI) by previous studies. However, the standard method to construct AQHI is summing the excess risks of single-pollutant models directly, which may ignore the joint effect of air pollutant mixtures.
In this study, a new method which could solve the aforementioned problem, Analytic hierarchy process (AHP), was introduced. Based on this method, we constructed the respiratory health related AQHI using years of life lost (YLL) as indicator of health outcome and compared its validity with AQI.
There was a correlation between daily AQI and AQHI in 2019 (R = 0.830, P < 0.01), and the chi-square test between the two excellent rates showed a statistically significant difference (χ = 4.156, P < 0.05). Both AQI and AQHI were correlated with the daily respiratory YLL (P < 0.01), however, the coefficient of AQHI was larger than those of AQI.
This study indicated that compared with AQI, the constructed AQHI based on AHP may predict the health risk of air pollution more effectively. AHP may become a new method to construct AQHI which needs to be proved by taking into consideration by more studies.
空气质量健康指数（AQHI）作为一种已开发的空气质量风险沟通工具，已被证明比空气质量指数（AQI）更能准确预测与空气质量相关的健康风险。然而，构建 AQHI 的标准方法是直接对单污染物模型的超额风险进行求和，这可能忽略了空气污染物混合物的联合效应。
本研究引入了一种新的方法，即层次分析法（AHP），可以解决上述问题。基于该方法，我们使用生命损失年（YLL）作为健康结果的指标构建了与呼吸健康相关的 AQHI，并将其有效性与 AQI 进行了比较。
2019 年，每日 AQI 与 AQHI 之间存在相关性（R=0.830，P<0.01），并且两者之间的优秀率的卡方检验显示出统计学上的显著差异（χ²=4.156，P<0.05）。AQI 和 AQHI 均与每日呼吸 YLL 相关（P<0.01），但 AQHI 的系数大于 AQI。
本研究表明，与 AQI 相比，基于 AHP 构建的 AQHI 可能更有效地预测空气污染的健康风险。AHP 可能成为构建 AQHI 的一种新方法，需要通过更多研究来证明。
